Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Recently on my daily mailing list, a longtime reader and friend of the list, Scott Gould, sent in a really good question about starting a podcast. And his question was this, Hi Jonathan, I'm curious. My thought on producing a podcast would be, would anybody even listen to it? What's your take on that? Because surely that's the most important thing to consider. Yours engagingly, Scott. Well sure, it would be nice if lots of people listened to your podcast, but if you start out with a one-on-one interview show format, which is my recommended starting format for new podcasters, it doesn't really matter if anyone listens. What? I shouldn't care if anyone listens to my podcast? Yeah, that's right. Having listeners is just one of the benefits of hosting a podcast, and in my opinion, it's not even the most important one. So here are three other benefits that I think are more important than getting listeners. Number one, building relationships. Hosting a podcast means you always have something to invite people to, especially luminaries in your field. If I reached out to Seth Godin and said, hey, you want to jump on a phone call for an hour so I can pick your brain? He would probably say no. But if I asked instead, hey, would you like to come on our podcast and talk about that thing you care about? Then he might agree. Seth, in fact, did come on The Business of Authority, and when I dreamed up the idea for that show, it was specifically for the purpose of having something to invite my favorite thought leaders to. It's nice that the audience is growing and all that, but all I really care about is getting to talk to really smart people for an hour. Okay, so that was the first benefit of having a podcast. The second one is researching your market. This is similar to the previous benefit, but instead of inviting rock stars to come on your show, you invite people from your target market and essentially have a free consulting call with them. This is a great way to get to know the hopes, dreams, worries, and fears of your ideal buyers without the pressure of trying to close a deal. As a side effect, improving your podcast interview skills will improve your sales interview skills. Plus, there's a bonus. If you're currently doing execution work like coding or copywriting or illustration or video production or whatever, and you want to transition into consulting or coaching or other types of pure advisory engagements, inviting ideal buyers from your target market onto your show is a low-risk way to road test your consulting capabilities and it helps you combat imposter syndrome when they react very positively to the free information that you've given them on the show. Alright, so that was the second thing, and now the third thing is rapid content creation. Hosting an interview show is a great way to create a huge amount of quality content very quickly. An hour-long chat with a guest will result in about 10,000 words of content. Could you write that many words in an hour? No. So for very little money, you can have your episodes transcribed and then read through to pull out rough drafts for shorter written articles that you could publish as blog posts or email messages or social media posts or whatever. So I could keep going with the benefits of podcasting, but hopefully you get the point. There are plenty of benefits to starting a podcast even if nobody listens. Thanks for listening. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is Ditching Hourly. Hey, Jonathan here again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.